Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in the section are not prior art to the claims in the application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in the section.
A number of emerging technologies offer a potential route to high-density integration of photonic components such as self-assembled nanowires, slot waveguides, photonics crystal waveguides, and plasmonic waveguides. Integrated photonic and nanophotonic components and circuits are of great interest in producing compact, power efficient, and low cost devices that can handle optical data routing and processing, and may have applications in areas such as optical signal regeneration and wavelength routing for high-bandwidth optical telecommunications. A challenge of interfacing with high-density optical circuits is that waveguide cross-sections in nanophotonic architectures are very small, often less than a few hundred nanometers, and strongly confined optical modes they support may experience severe diffraction at the ends of light guiding structures if not well aligned.